The $30M app that lets you invest like a politician

All right. I own $40 million, $10 million in revenue.

We acquire shit, and this year we'll generate around $20 million of revenue.

We manage shit, and that makes $30 million per year of revenue for the company.

Those are 3 ideas that didn't even exist in my, my cone of vision. You know, I didn't even know that people do businesses like that. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's try.

All right. How's it feel to be in real life? This is strange.

This is weird. It's been, uh, there's normally a screen right here. Actually, we should put a side by side of the last time we were in person in San Francisco doing it on the red chairs.

So when we, um, when you started this thing and then I came on 2 or 3 months later, we had these bright red chairs that we bought off Amazon for $150 and it was just us sitting on chairs and I hated it because you could like see like a crotch shot.

Yeah, I think I might be doing it now.

And you're just like sitting like this. And then we had a, like a camcorder.

We would have a guy in the room and we'd be like, hey, are we good to go? Is it all good? Audio, video? And he'd be like, I think so. It was like, I think so is like not what you want to hear from the guy who's just setting up the camera.

He was my summer intern.

Yeah.

And it was one camera.

You ever done audio video before? No.

But I hear you.

Yeah. Yeah. I can hear you great.

What do you think of New York? You been to a bodega yet?

Yeah, we went to a bodega.

Yeah. So I talk about bodega culture. I don't know if you've like seen any that have impressed you. Have you seen any that have impressed you?

I have to like stay out of bodegas because I just start chatting it up for too long.

It's the best, right?

Like, dude, I've been here for 75 minutes talking to this guy.

Like the, like the cashier. Yeah, it's the best. I'm friends with so many bodega owners.

We could do a full MFM just inside a bodega. I probably should have done that actually.

And like, it's the pure definition of entrepreneurship because you could clearly tell like, oh, one day someone asked for cereal. Now they have 10 Costco-sized things of cereal and they're individually packed into an ice coffee cup and they just sell cereal now. Like, that's just what they do. There's no like, does this go with our mission statement? Like, no, we sell cereal now, right? I don't know if you need a license to sell food, even though it says don't repackage this for individual sale. We sell cereal now, right? And that's what I love. All right. So today we're doing something a little bit special. You said you were coming and I reached out. I basically just Slacked like the Hampton channel. I go, who in New York has like an odd business that we can like impress Sean with? And so we picked 3 different entrepreneurs.

They have—

I tried to find 3 businesses that were off the beaten path a little bit because that's why people like watching MFM. You guys like watching or seeing like kind of strange businesses. So hopefully you can open up your mind and be like, oh, there's a million ways to get done whatever I want to get done and build a big company, right? So I picked 3.

Okay.

Okay. So they're going to come on. What are they going to do?

So we told them, we just bumped into them. We just told them, hey, come in here and don't start with words.

This is MFM.

You got to start with a number. And, um, don't make us dig it out of you. Just give it to us. You know the shtick. You know what we like to do. We like to know everything. We like you to not be humble and brag about that. We want you to brag a little. So they're going to say a number, they're going to say what they do, and then we're going to get to know their business because we're nerdy about businesses. And then at the end, you know, we will ask them two things. We'll ask them what adjacent business opportunities are there. Like what other businesses do they see because of where they are in their tiny niche that we don't have enough exposure to that other people might go run at. And then two, like, how can we help them? Like, what's the, what's the burning question? What if they just had me and you for like, you know, 10 minutes? What would they want to talk to us about? So that's what we're going to try.

All right.

The first guy, Ben, we could bring him in. What's up?

How you doing?

All right. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks.

All right. So I've known Alex for years. For a year.

Yeah. A year.

A year. We're very good friends, so I'm going to be biased. Okay, start us off with the big number.

40 magazines, $10 million in revenue.

Yeah.

What, what sorts of magazines are we talking?

Real estate advertising.

Real estate advertising. Okay, give us an example.

All right.

So you got to carry one. You don't have one on you at all times? That's insane.

Yeah.

Real estate agents basically pay us to promote their listings. So magazine is like a lookbook of all the listings that are on the market at that time in their neighborhood.

And it goes to a lot of different, like, locations. Like, do you have different— 40 meaning—

Yeah, 40, 40 meaning basically we've divided the country into 40 locations. Yeah, zones. So we're covering all of the US and Canada.

How big is the magazine? Like, how many pages?

Anywhere from like 100 to 200.

Well, who's the reader? Because realtors are the ones advertising or want—

Realtors are advertising.

Who's the reader?

We, we have a mixture, but basically we mail the magazine out and we'll mail it out based on property value, income, things like that.

With the goal of being a real estate agent is— has a bunch of listings in New York City or something, I don't know, Dayton, Ohio.

Yeah.

And you want to show the resident of the homes on this block that they should either use this real estate agent or buy some of the nearby homes.

Yeah, either or.

Okay.

Yeah. Agents definitely are using it to pick up listings. Like they want to be able to say, look, I'm going to advertise your home, things like that. But they also want to sell the listing they have.

And what's it called?

Haven Lifestyles.

Haven Lifestyle. Okay. How did you come up with this idea?

All right. So I started it with my business partner, Ryan. We were college roommates. I was a couple of years out of college. I was actually a bill collector for like 5 years through college and after.

A bill collector?

I was a bill collector, which I actually, I think really helped with sales. Like just having to call people all day for money, being rejected.

Are you like the muscle? Like what is a bill collector actually doing here?

Dialing them up. It was, it was credit card. So it's like Victoria's Secret. It's literally Victoria's Secret credit cards. But yeah, anyhow, I did that. I actually, I was a supervisor. I got drug into some HR nonsense that I couldn't believe and like having to basically defend myself. And I texted my college buddy. I'm like, dude, you want to do something? And he was like, yeah, let's, let's start the magazine. So that's where we started.

But why the idea of the magazine? He was already doing it?

He had a small publication in Annapolis, Maryland, and he said that basically agents had reached out to him and like, why don't you do something in D.C.? We want advertise in D.C., so we just launched one.

Who's the biggest? How many companies do what you do?

Most— there's a lot of small publications. So like each city you go into will have like a publication, but we have them across the whole country.

And you do $10 million in revenue. Can you say how much profit?

Yeah, like $2.5 million.

Okay. And the biggest one in the space is how big?

I don't know. It's not public. I don't— I mean, we could be one of the biggest in the space. Like there's not— most of them are franchised.

How many years you've been doing this?

10.

10. Okay, so it's been a slow build. You've been steady at this revenue for a while.

It's been a slow build that, that has jumps.

Give us year 1. What was year 1 like?

$300K. And that's just me going, meeting individually, like just grinding it out.

Okay.

And my business partner handling everything else.

And did you know right away, like, this is it, I'm going to do this for a while? Or were you even after year 1, were you still like, I don't know?

But so, so the, it's more like a brochure, but it's a magazine because it's got a lot of pages, but it's a brochure. I mean, you're just showing off other, other people's stuff.

You're just sending a magazine unsolicited, correct?

There's not like a subscriber. It's true. It's no subscribers.

You're junk mail.

Sure.

Junk.

Yeah.

It's not, it's, it's not a subscriber magazine. Also, I should say, I mean, that's like calling Victoria's Secret just underwear.

Yeah, exactly.

A huge portion is online at this point. Like, we do drive most of our traffic online, but everyone is paying to be in the magazine.

And who is doing— so let's say I want to be in the magazine and I like say like, yeah, I'm in. Who does the artwork? Who actually makes like the pages?

We handle it. Most of our designers are—

Philippines.

What's that? Philippines? Yeah, basically.

And how many of them are there? Because to have 40 magazines and how often, quarterly or monthly?

They're all every once every 6 weeks. We print 30 different magazines a month. Why did you just say— So every week we've got 7 going to prison.

Most of it's online.

Most of the exposure. So when you're talking about subscribers, junk mail, whatever. So like we mail copies out, we do that based on, like I said, net worth, things like that. And then we're also driving another, you know, 90% of our readers online, which are then looking for people that have like recently been looking for homes, things like that.

How many people work there?

20.

So I'm confused. This is a dumb question. I don't really understand how junk mail works. So I can just mail anything to anybody?

You can mail anything to anyone.

So you just look up like, hey, addresses, like which zip codes or neighborhoods have a certain profile.

Yeah.

And then you download from some site all the addresses.

Yeah, it's all through the post office. Like you, you basically can pick postal routes and they'll deliver. It's actually cheaper when you do that.

How many magazines do you send a year?

Uh, like half a million. Yeah.

So this is the post office's business model, right? Like, yeah, basically the post office is pretty much funded by guys like you who are using it.

Yeah, exactly. It's Facebook. It's selling—

you are the product.

It's selling your address and your mailbox without you benefiting or agreeing to it to others.

What would it take to get you to $100 million in revenue? It's definitely possible.

No, no. Ask in the, like, Asian mom way. Why aren't you at $100 million yet?

Um, yeah, I mean, it's a good question.

Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the unsexy business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast.

So hundreds of episodes.

The team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the unsexy ideas. So not the super high-tech ones, but the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable, uh, ideas that we have brainstormed. And they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show.

It's kind of a question I would have for you too, because I know you always say you get to $10 million. I know you can get to $100 million. So like, how? I think there's a few different ways. I don't think there's like one, like, switch, a flip of a switch. I think there's a lot of other verticals we could be hitting other than real estate agents, like home services, that sort of thing you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah.

Which we do within our publication. But I think if it was specific to their market—

You've told us about the business, magazine company, a.k.a. junk mail. You send it to people. What's the burning question? Like, where could Smart friends help you. Yeah.

I mean, honestly, I do think that question of how do you take this from 10 to 100?

Can I take a stab at helping you? So, uh, first I always want to know what's the default growth rate? Meaning how much did you grow last year to this year? What do we— what do I expect if nothing changes?

Probably like 10%.

10%. Okay. So to get to 100, or is your real goal 100? What's your real goal?

My real goal is to double profit.

Double profit. Okay. So you might not even need to grow top line.

We grow profit faster than we grow. Revenue.

Yeah. It seemed like when Sam was asking you, like, who's the biggest at doing this? And you're kind of like, ah, we might be the biggest. One thing that I can immediately tell that's very different about you than the way both— both me and Sam are reverse engineer type guys. We like to understand what's working for others, how big other people are, to give ourselves— like, we create this almost like box. And I feel like you don't do that as much. Is that fair?

Definitely. Yeah.

Yeah.

But you're happy.

Yeah, super epic.

What I mean is like, to be clear, we have a sickness and you seem fine, but we'd like to infect you with our sickness.

He doesn't need to change.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you did want to change, here's what I might do. I think what I would do is maybe it's not like direct, like, oh, who also sends home listings, sells to realtors, but just the general model of mailing out magazines or informational stuff. To homes and generating a big business off the back of that. Who else does that? That's not exactly your space. Like, yeah, are there like wealth management companies that grow this way or is there some other category that grows this way?

I think the most— I mean, it's a little different, but I think the most intriguing are like neighborhood publications. So I don't know if you've heard of Stroll, but they do like—

Revolution?

Is that one?

I don't think it's Revolution. There's Stroll. There are others.

Is this kind of like what's going on in your area?

Exactly.

Years ago I talked about this. I think it was called Revolution. It was a neighborhood publication that's a franchise model. Model that, back then, we, I think we were in real life when we did this, actually, it was like north of $100 million.

Yeah, they're, they're definitely over $100 million.

My gut tells me that if you did have dedicated home services, that would be much.

And maybe there's a way to do it more informationally. So instead of the one you do right now, you're just like, here's the homes for sale. It's kind of like utilitarian. If you just said like, hey, here's all the home service providers, that wouldn't be that great. But if it was like, let's say it's winter and it's like Here's the 5 tips every homeowner should do for, like, listicle type of content.

Right.

And then on the inside there's providers, but like, you just do something that's actually like the ad. The front cover is basically like free, a give. It's, it's useful information, entertaining, useful information about, about home service or home care.

Yeah.

And then inside you obviously have home care providers where if people don't want to do it themselves, they could hire pros to come do this stuff for them. I wonder if you could get good at that. But I would just kind of— if I was you, I would start with a— not an answer, but a study. I would go get real familiar with what are all the other players doing in the space? Who's big, who's not, who used to work there? Go talk to them, go learn from them. Like, I would kind of go on like a, like a 1-month expedition of that. And I think you'll know so much more by the end of that.

Him and I are buddies. We talk about hiring all the time. I'm like, just go recruit someone who's at the bigger company and just have them come and work for you. Yeah. Why? And is there a world where instead of 40, it could be 80 markets?

It would be dicing the— well, we could go international. We're already in Canada. So there are markets that make sense for us to go into. But as far as 40 to 80, you would then break down the 40 into 80. It's the same geographical area. It's just going to be more because, I mean, we're literally covering the whole U.S. Got it. But I do think if you break it down, it's going to resonate more like there are areas that we have full states combined together. Because it's just not like Ohio, Indiana. It's just not that sexy of a market.

Would you ever sell this?

I would. It's not necessarily my goal. I'm pretty happy doing it forever. Yeah.

God, it's crazy.

You might be too happy.

It's crazy talking to, like, an emotionally stable person.

Yes, but it is, it is more recent change in the mindset.

So what is the goal and the date we can hold you to?

It was 1 year from a month ago. So it's, we got 11 months to double. Yeah.

Double profit.

To be at a double, double as in double the run rate at that point.

So get to $4 million in run rate profit.

$5 million. Yeah.

$5 million.

How's the first month been in terms of, uh, If we were saying like out of 12 months, you've already used whatever, 8% of your time. Are you like doing what you needed to do to create a bunch of momentum or not really?

It's like, yeah, I think so. The main thing, the easiest way to double profits right now, I think, is retention. We already work with 10,000+ agents every year, but we don't get them to advertise that many times. So, I mean, literally double retention and we're fine.

You have the inventory yourself.

Exactly. We have, we have the clients like we have people that are agreeing to advertise with us.

Do you ask them multiple times?

Yeah, we ask them every, every cycle.

Why don't they just do it again if they're, if it's a money breaker for them?

A lot of times they just want, it's like, you know, I've got a big listing, great, now's the time, and then they just drop off.

Do you ever pre-sell them on, like, instead of, um, this one time, you say, I'll give you a discount if you do it for 12 months?

Yeah, yeah, I, we have like 1,500 people that do it for the year. So they're just on auto debit. So there's a decent amount doing that, but I think there's a lot of things we can do to improve their experience where they're coming back every month or just, I just need them to advertise one more time basically.

I wish you would have brought us one.

In the last, in the last, okay, let's say this year, how many of those agents have you personally talked to on the phone?

Zero.

Should I?

Okay. Not necessarily to sell them, but like even just take your 100 top spenders. You should call every single one of them and figure out what do they love? What do they hate? Why aren't they doing it more? How do you get them? Are they actually— it's just been out of sight, out of mind. Oh yeah, I will do it. And you will learn a lot just by taking a roster of your top 100. I also learned this in our recent business that, that, that's done pretty well. I asked the CEO, I was like, hey, like, this has gone pretty well. What did you do? And he goes, you know what I did? I came in and he goes, I tiered out our key clients as tier 1, tier 2, tier 3. And he created a, a definition for each. He goes, tier 1 is somebody who's— they would do me a favor. I have them on a texting relationship. They know me, I know them. They would do me a favor, you know, quickly. Tier 2 is I got their email. We've traded some emails. We like each other.

We're acquaintances.

We're—

yeah, we're friendly acquaintances. Tier 3 is like, we're transactional. Like, when they need me, they call me. When I need them, I call them. We haven't really talked much because that transaction is infrequent.

Yeah.

And then there's Tier 4, which is like worse than that. And he's like, when you do that and you just score yourself like, oh, what would a, what would a really healthy relationship look like here? Or what would a really weak relationship look like here? And then you look at your top 100 and you realize, shit, we have no tier 1s, couple tier 2s, and everybody else is tier 3 or 4. Then it's like a wake-up call. Nothing bad's going to happen by talking to your top 100 customers, but a lot of good can happen from, from going and talking to them.

Yeah, I like that.

And you could do that in 30 days. You could talk to all 100 in 30 days.

What do you think? Are you impressed? Did you ever know that something like this could exist? No.

It's so simple of a business too, right?

Like, yeah, it's pretty simple.

I mean, it's just, they didn't even subscribe. I'm used to media businesses where it's like, first, I win their hearts and minds and I get them to listen to me regularly or read me every day. Then I get to make money. He's like, no, no, no.

Read this.

Yeah.

Read. Yeah.

Ah, he, uh, have you heard? That's incredible. Why are we doing junk mail?

You know Lindy?

The AI tool?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Flo, the guy who started Lindy's in Hampton, and he's like, Alex Daniels has the most impressive AI setup I've ever seen. Oh, and that's been like a little bit of a claim of fame that he's had.

What, what, give us a little sauce real quick. What are you doing?

Uh, we used Lindy to basic, to, to run the sales process.

So they don't have salespeople.

That's awesome.

All right.

Appreciate you, dude. What you've done is awesome, dude.

All right.

Thanks, guys.

Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice. All using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. We need like a name for this. Dragon's Den, the Shark Tank, the, the swimming pool, the denim dungeon.

Let's go.

The denim dungeon. What's up? What up, brother?

How's it going? How are you?

All right. Your name and the impressive number.

Hit us with the big number.

Great. I'm Josh. I run Team Outsider. We acquire family-owned campgrounds, and this year we'll generate around $20 million of revenue.

$20 million in revenue. Okay, so explain like I'm an idiot because I kind of am. What do you do exactly?

So, yeah, so we acquire campgrounds typically from families who are looking to retire. And campground, the majority of it is like a hotel, right? So we're renting different spaces. Some people come in their RVs, so they have effectively a traveling hotel room. We also have tent spaces and cabins that we rent to people who don't want to stay in a tent and don't have an RV.

Do you camp? When's the last time you went camping?

Like 10 years ago, but I appreciate it.

I haven't gone camping in like 20 years. So a campground is literally just a piece of dirt, right? It's the ground.

We have amenities. So all of our campgrounds have stores. We typically have a cafe where we'll sell ice cream and sometimes burgers and pizza.

Like cabins, basically, or—

We have cabins as well. Yeah, we have swimming pools, lakes. At one of our campgrounds, we have a go-kart track.

Okay, so it's a very outdoorsy hotel, essentially.

Effectively, yeah.

Okay, we're looking at one here. What's like the most popular one you guys have?

They're all really popular in their local communities. The first one we bought, which is right near Grand Teton in Yellowstone, is really popular because that's a major tourist destination. We have one right outside New York City called the Neversink River Resort, a couple of hours away. So that's really popular with folks who live around here.

So give us a, give us the story. What makes a guy want to buy a campground? How do you even realize that that's a good opportunity?

So how many do you own?

Currently we have 16 and there are about 4,000 sites amongst those in 10 states.

And did you raise money?

Yeah. So the first one we did with our own cash and an SBA loan. So just kind of—

that was the Yellowstone one.

How much was that?

About $3 million.

And so how much money of yours and loan did you put?

The loan was 80-plus percent. Yeah, the rest was cash.

Sorry.

So that was an already operating site.

Everything we buy is existing cash flow. It's been there generally for decades. Most of these are staples within their local communities.

So let's walk through that first one. So you find this property, it's doing what when you buy it?

It was generating around half a million dollars of top line of total income.

Top line. And then the cash flow on that's what?

About 35%.

Can you do that for me?

Yeah, we call it $150K.

Okay. And you buy that for $3 million. Okay, so that's, that's the entry. And then you do that knowing, hey, we think we can turn that $150K into $250K. What was the, the insight at the time?

Yeah, so that one didn't have a lot of digital marketing. It was—

was it like a mom-and-pop thing?

All of them are.

And it's all— everything's on paper and they've been doing it forever and they're like, our kids don't want this shit. Do you want it?

And what are we going to do to make it better? And what is— what does better mean?

Yeah, so there are a few things we can do. One of them is introduce just professionalized systems. So digital marketing, a better website, voice— VoIP systems for the phone to be able to make sure that the training is happening the right way.

Does marketing mean like Yelp and Google reviews?

Google reviews, but also paid ads, a better website. Oftentimes there's no digital reservation systems. We'll introduce that.

Got it.

So that's kind of on the technology side.

I think I missed it. So you're like, I wanted to do something with my friend and then you had the like business school explanation, like high fragmentation. But no, no, no. Like, where were you sitting when someone was like, should we buy campgrounds? Or like you met a guy who was rich that bought campgrounds. You're like, we should do that shit. Like, what actually happened?

Great question. So our backgrounds were in hospitality and real estate.

Okay.

So there's like obvious confluence there. And then Cody lives in Bozeman, Montana, and is an avid RVer. So he said, hey, like, the thesis sounds interesting. Why don't you fly out here and let's drive around the country, meet some owners, team members, guests, and see if this is something that actually has a little bit of a spark to it. So I flew out from New York, spent some time on the road meeting different campground owners and team members and guests, and just fell in love with the space.

And how much money have you raised in total now?

We have raised Around $60 million.

You raised $60 million from our—

what'd you say, 15-ish properties?

We've sold a couple, but we have 16 currently.

And what is it all worth?

North of $100 million.

Does that mean that $40 million is you and your partner's equity?

No, we've raised outside capital. So at this point we have family offices we work with, we have a select group of accredited investors we work with, and we have a few institutional partners that we've worked with as well.

I guess what I'm saying is of the $20 million in revenue, or if you value it— I'm not— I don't know anything about real estate. However you value it, how do you get personal personal cash flow or net worth from it?

Like most real estate operators, it's promote-based, and different deals are different depending on the investment partner, right? So we are back-end incentivized largely for most of these, uh, typical private equity structure where there's a preferred return, there's a return of capital, and then there's a split depending on kind of who the investor profile is.

And so when you do that first one, you go buy it for $3 million, it's doing half a million in revenue, $150K of cash flow, What happened? What was the like success story of that one? Obviously it was a success.

Yeah.

You wouldn't have 16 more.

You brought the income, the NOI up to what?

The NOI in that one went from closer to, closer to $300,000 at that point.

Okay. So you doubled the profit on the, on the thing, recap, refinance it out, use that capital to go buy the next one.

Exactly. Exactly.

That's pretty awesome.

Why are campgrounds— if I wanted to go do real estate, why would I choose campgrounds instead of whatever, retail shopping, multifamily, office, whatever. What would, what would be my advantages if I was going into this?

Will you do this for forever?

I hope so. Like, yeah, you just— I love it.

Like, like looking down 10 years or 20 years down the line, where do you hope to be business-wise?

Yes. Look, I think the, the larger opportunity as more of life moves online, I believe businesses that get people together in the real world are going to be more valuable. And there are different types of experience-oriented real estate that can speak to that thesis. But campgrounds still have a lot of runway. We still have a big pipeline of properties we'd like to be a part of. And so hopefully we're doing this for forever.

Who are the big dogs in this space?

Yeah, so there are two very large REITs in this space that initially were into the manufactured housing side of the business, but recognized both from a depreciation perspective and also the infrastructure is very similar, right? You're renting—

there's a campground REIT.

There are manufactured housing REITs that have a large portion of campground exposure.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah. So that was one of the ways we were researching this that we got a little more comfortable with the idea.

When you're buying, you're buying out the operator and then you put a property manager, property management companies, or the manager. You are the manager.

Your branding is cool. It's awesome.

I appreciate that.

And when I was looking, I was like, oh, I would like to go see this. Is there a world where you would buy, buy many of them in a similar region and create a membership? You know, like KOA? Is it KOA?

Yeah, we're actually a KOA franchisee in certain markets.

So how do I explain KOA to someone? I mean, I don't know.

McDonald's of campgrounds.

Okay.

They've got 550 flags across the country. They own about 50 of them themselves, but they are a franchise.

No, no, they're—

but is it like he's saying where it's a membership or it's just a brand? It's not a membership. You know what you're going to get.

It's a brand you can trust and you know what you can get.

Yeah. It's like when I, when I do road trips and I want to camp, it's like something might be a lot nicer. Something could be a lot worse. But KOA, I just, I know what I'm rolling up on.

Like I was talking to a kind of like a famous guy and he was like, oh, out an hour outside of cities, there's something called, was it What is it, Postcard Cabins or something like that? He's like, oh, I love going to those with my kids. It's like, what's the, what's the story there? Then I looked it up. It's like owned by Marriott or something.

They sold to Marriott last year. It's a little bit of a different model. They were focused on very remote single units in destinations where you didn't have to see your neighbors. We are more community focused. So a lot of our campgrounds have seasonal guests, which basically means these are people who reserve the right to a specific space for the duration of the season, pay before the season starts and come every year. Grandma's there, aunts and uncles are there, kids are there, everyone's been raised there, all the friends are around. So it's very sticky and communal.

But is there a world where you do brand it? So it's similar to each, each property has maybe a different shtick, but it's all under one brand potentially down the road.

I think real estate brands are inherently tough to scale. Yeah. And until we have meaningfully more scale, that's probably not the right focus for us. But as regional concentration starts to happen, which is already naturally happening, Perhaps that's something to explore.

So when I hear you, I know nothing about real estate. When I hear you describe this, I think that sounds awesome. You're outdoors all the time. You're doing all this stuff. Obviously, that's not the case. What's the day-to-day work? Are you just like cold calling these places, trying to make a deal?

Writing a lot of handwritten letters, a lot of cold calling, a lot of checking up on—

Have you found like a letter with a cookie converts better than like, you know, a call?

A lot of it is luck. The challenge in this space is effectively our sellers are behind the front desk most of the time, which means in season they're exhausted and they don't want to take a call.

So the bottleneck of the business is just getting in touch and wooing—

finding people who want to sell, building relationships and being the trusted succession plan because they care.

They don't care. It's not just a money thing for them.

Exactly. These are their friends that they have been personally servicing for oftentimes decades. And so whoever's taking over that relationship is a really important—

is there like a— like a campground owners summit publication or summit or podcast. Yeah, there are Facebook groups and conventions and you're just like posting them all the time with like the same thumbnail image of across all of them. So everyone like starts saying like, oh, this is the guy. He seems like a good guy.

A bit of that. We're trying to figure out how to do it in an authentic way. And that's a tough balance because there's a level of mistrust around being over-marketed to in this space. So a lot of it is catching them on the right day when the campground's a little bit less busy and they answer the phone and we can start a relationship and then, you know, years later when they're ready to sell, we got the call.

That sounds pretty awesome. Is this— how many hours a week do you work?

A lot.

Yeah.

You grind?

Oh, yeah.

You're in grind mode?

Yeah, absolutely. But I love it.

There's a lot of real estate people, they choose real estate because while real estate is work, there's a way to do it or a state you can reach that is not about grinding. And it's about like you have a lot of flexibility and you got cash flow coming in or you're— you flip a property and you can take time off, you know, you could do all kinds of things. Sounds like you're approaching it more like company building than it is—

Company building. And it's a hospitality business, right? We've got tens of thousands of guests every year, 350 people on the team. So there's no, no easy break period.

Is there— are the people you employ to run a campsite, are they pains in the asses? Like, are they hippies or are they meth addicts?

No, we have some amazing people that work with us. We are—

We'll clip this and send it to them after you answer this question.

And what was that like?

Terrifying. Yeah, he actually was incredibly nice and reasonable, but the drive in, I was very scared. Had another situation where we found out through a guest that some people on the team had been cutting down our trees and selling the wood for cash on a Facebook page. So it wasn't a great situation. And again, these are total outlier situations. They're just fun for conversation.

Hey, why do you live in New York? Why do you do this in New York?

My family's here. My wife's here. My son's here. My parents are here. My in-laws are here. So, you know, when you have kids and the grandparents around— but my partner's in Bozeman and Look, let's hit it real quick.

What's the burning question? If you had a burning question, something that we can give you kind of a quick, maybe different insight on than as an outsider, what would be helpful?

Sure. As you think about what we do in trying to scale culture to a team of hourly employees across 10 states with this workforce, what is something that we could do differently to keep people incentivized to deliver the level of service that we're trying to deliver? If you can solve this in 10 minutes, I will love you forever.

Yeah.

Good luck.

Amazing.

Look forward to it. But yeah, that guy's awesome. And he gave you like some actionable tips. Yeah.

Fantastic.

Thank you. Right on.

Well, thanks for—

congrats on everything, man. Thanks for coming on.

Appreciate it, guys.

God bless, dude. All right.

See you.

Should go camping.

Yeah, it's pretty awesome. A billionaire venture capitalist who's one of the greatest investors of all time. His name is Bill Gurley. He recently wrote about the single most important principle when it comes to building a company. It wasn't fundraising, it wasn't product-market fit, it wasn't even hiring. Bill said that an engaged peer network might be the most powerful growth tool available, but it's also one of the most underdiscussed is often underutilized. Now, keep in mind, Bill is a seed investor to Uber, Zillow, OpenTable. And so he's had a front row seat into how some of the best companies actually operate. And after decades of watching what separates the winners from the rest, he lands on this: who you're in the room with is the most important thing to whether you're going to be successful and build a great company or not. Now, most of you founders who are listening to this, you treat a peer network as something that's a nice to have, something that you're going to eventually get to do. But you actually never get around to making it happen. My company, Hampton, we have changed that. We build curated groups of highly vetted founders in cities across the United States, Canada, and England. This isn't a surface-level networking event. It's not a mastermind full of strangers. It's a peer group of 8 other entrepreneurs who will challenge you, hold you accountable, push you to grow, and you'll meet with every single month in your city. Apply at joinhampton.com/mfm and I will reply in the next 24 hours to help figure out if there's a good group in your city that's the right fit.

All right.

All right. The last one is going to be funny. All right.

How's it going?

What's up?

All right. Welcome to the hot seat. The denim den.

The denim den.

Let's go.

Is it live right now?

The dudes in denim, we're live. Let's go.

All right. You want to give us the big—

I'm shocked. That's crazy. I didn't realize how big you guys were. So what's the business do?

Yeah, so the business we're most popular for launching the Nancy Pelosi stock tracker on Twitter.

I thought your big number was going to be Like 44%, that's Nancy Pelosi's annual returns, or, you know, what are her annual returns? What does Nancy Pelosi do?

In your app, I can invest alongside her picks because she's a politician.

So exactly.

So there is she. She's not a politician anymore.

So her— well, she retires in January of 2027. So we have that much time to copy her trades and follow her trades.

But basically I can follow anyone.

Because the whole premise of Autopilot was anyone can become a— is that anyone can become a hedge fund?

Exactly.

And so instead of like having a Substack newsletter where you could follow my content, I can charge a certain amount and you could follow my trades or my portfolio that I think is good.

Exactly.

Got it.

And I think there's a lot of Substacks. I'm sure we've all like read some of them, but you don't know like the performance of this person. Maybe they're right and they'll always— they might be the winners.

They write a very convincing case and then they talk about how last time they were right, but you only know their cherry-picking winners.

They might have been wrong like 3 or 4 other times for that one. And so with Autopilot, you have a track record of success. You can see people's winners or losers, their performance, their entire performance, and then you can see how many dollars are following them, their content, etc.

How much money have you raised?

We've raised about $16 million.

One six.

Yeah, one six, $16 million.

And $30 million in revenue seems like a good company.

Yeah.

What's that worth?

I don't know. We're going out to raise a Series B. The valuations at different venture firms have, you know, floated around between $300-400 million, which is crazy, but that is venture money. Not sure what it's actually worth.

How old are you?

31.

You start this business. What was the first idea you had here? First idea is what?

So the first idea we actually started 6 years ago was an idea. It was a company called Iris. Iris for the eyes. So you could see into other people's portfolios. I was trading on Robinhood.

You've been thinking about this idea for like 6+ years.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think like, like we all kind of any retail trader, I don't know if you guys invest in the stock market yourself on an app.

Yeah.

Anyone's like, there's stocks that just fly and it's kind of obvious. Like I remember buying Nvidia or buying Tesla and you're like, like some things are just obvious to younger people, but if you just like don't do the research, you're not going to get those asymmetric gains.

Yeah, but most people don't do the research.

Most— yeah, most people don't. And I think most things I think are obvious are wrong.

Most of the time when I invest, I lose money.

That is fair. And there's— do you have like the inverse Cramer effect?

No, no, no.

But I think, I think there are certain people who just have a knack for it. And I think we were talking earlier about like how most people people should just invest in index funds. I would say I think that's true for the most part because a lot of people want to do it themselves, especially I think there's this advent of DIY. But I think the goal is for autopilot, for you to find someone who you have confidence in and can see the track record of success. You put like 10 to 20% of your net worth, not all of it, but in about 10 to 20% in these high-risk, high-reward strategies.

You know what's fun? Wait, so we're doing this Ray Dalio thing tomorrow. We're interviewing him and he started as a newsletter. It was like a $1,500 a month newsletter that SmartPants— and then someone was like, hey, if you think you're the man, then why don't you have your own fund? And like, you know, and he's like, maybe I will.

And now he has the biggest one.

So my question is like, why doesn't— I think, you know, Motley Fool. So Motley Fool does 9 figures a year in subscription revenue. So for you don't know Motley Fool, you give them $100 or some amount of money and they give you stock picks. But they also have a fund where they invest in their own picks. And I think they have over $1 billion AUM. It's all public. You can like look it up. So will like every financial blogger who like is a stock picker like be an Autopilot person?

Yeah, I think that's going to happen. We have—

then there's going to be way less of them because everyone's going to be able to see who's legit and who's not.

See, exactly. And so we have a 6,000-person waitlist to like launch a portfolio on Autopilot. So we do a lot of due diligence. We look at the track record of success. We'll look at— we'll analyze their actual portfolio because, for example, if you run a newsletter but your actual portfolio is bad, we don't really want you on the platform.

Who's the most famous or successful person that launched their portfolio on here, not like you're tracking the politicians.

There's a guy named Peter Wolf. And so I checked out his personal Robinhood account and I was like, this guy's up 200%.

How do you check someone's personal Robinhood?

Just by like, I would go on a video call and I would look at it. But right now we have tech where he could actually connect his Robinhood account to our platform and we could analyze it.

And 200%?

Over, over, over 3 years. And I was like, all right, 200% over 3 years.

That's a pretty small amount of time, right?

3 years is like— Yeah. A lot of people, right? And it's like, what does it do in a downturn? But I liked the way he was thinking about what he does to hedge against risk. And I was like, you know what, like launch on the platform.

You guys are kind of like you're, you are like the editorial team. You're the American Idol. You're letting them sort of audition. You're picking, right?

Yeah.

So you're picking the pickers, then they launch their portfolio. People then pay upfront to do it, or people just copy the trade and you get it. That person gets a commission.

Yeah. There's like a subscription fee, very similar to Substack. How much? Um, the pilot could, we call them pilots, they could set it. It ranges from $100 a year to $500 a year.

And so they do that.

Whoa.

Which is insane.

That's outside of their stock. That's just their Autopilot revenue.

That's just their Autopilot.

And so they, and so that's like, that means they have how many subscribers? Like 10,000 subscribers?

100,000? It depends on how much they charge. But for example, Peter Wolf has around $220 million following him on Autopilot.

Oh, so you see like how many dollars are backing you?

Yeah. And so again, for example, this is a stat that we pull. Bill Ackman, who traditionally raised a lot of money really quickly when he graduated Harvard, it took him about 5 years to raise $60 million. This guy on Autopilot within 1 year raised $220 million.

So you're basically— it's kind of like Justin Bieber was YouTube native.

Yeah, right.

He was a YouTuber first, then became Justin Bieber. And you're basically saying like the next Bill Ackman, the next generation's Ray Dalio is going to come from— it's going to come like ours or from you guys.

Do I put my money into Peter's fund?

Yeah. So what would happen is you connect your Robinhood account or whatever brokerage you have and it, we, it automatically follows his fund. So when he makes a trade, we send a notification to your brokerage to automatically buy or sell that security.

Copy trade.

But it's not giving the money to the guy.

Yeah.

And that's actually your Robinhood. Yeah.

And that's how we are able to operate from a legal standpoint. Whenever you're giving custody of assets away to someone, the SEC gets really involved. Is that a brokerage? You have custody. That's when a lot of regulation pops up.

How old is the business?

Autopilot. We've been running Autopilot for 3 years, but the entire business, like, structure is 6 years.

So Autopilot has existed in 3 awesome years. Yeah. What's going to happen in 6 years when you have 3 shit years?

If we have 3 shitty years.

Like stock market shitty years is what he's saying.

I think what we see is the retail investor right now perseveres longer than they used to. 3 years is a long time. I would say if it was like 3 years downturn, like consistently, I feel like the whole world will— there'll be a lot of questions for the whole world.

But that happens.

It happens to like Robinhood and these other guys, right? Like, what do you mean?

I think 3 years straight, it hasn't really happened, but I think you'll see like 1.5 years happen.

So I think Robinhood almost died.

Yeah, I read that. Yeah.

But they, they didn't because they had raised billions of dollars.

Yeah. And they, they had an emergency funding round.

Yeah. So like it was a near-death moment.

When was that?

During the GameStop? Yeah, during GameStop. They were about to go under and I think they had raised $40 billion like immediately and— or not, sorry, $4 billion immediately.

Because they needed liquidity or what?

There's something with like being a brokerage and like the DTCC, not too familiar with it, but they're like, you need to post up this money. We don't have—

are people nervous to invest? Are venture guys nervous to invest?

I think what we've seen in venture is just the AI wave. And it's just not— fintech was sexy in 2020, 2021. Right now with our metrics, I would think it would be very exciting for venture.

Like we have some friends in fintech, like a lot of fintech companies make like no revenue. Like, you know, you could be like, what's the thing called? Wealthfront. And you could have billions of dollars in AUM and like your fees are so tiny that So you're making $30 actual million in revenue? Yeah. Or GMV, like, you still have to pay it up.

So right now, because we've launched our own portfolios where we take 100% of the revenue, like the Plosi portfolio is ours, so we get 100% of that revenue. Our GMV revenue is $30 million, but our Autopilot ARR is around $22 million.

Okay, so you have more real revenue than like, remember Ankur was doing Carry and like he had like a billion in AUM, but the revenue was like literally a million.

Yeah, I think, yeah, I know that's, that to me always blows my mind. I think the thing that's interesting about us is when you look at other traditional asset managers, they just put your money in like ETFs and like mutual funds and there's no real alpha they're trying to get you. So they can't really charge that much money because you're like, why would I go to them? Why don't I just go to Wealthfront that charge like 0.1%? And so with Autopilot, the reason you pay so much is because these people are there. The hope is that they outperform the market. And so I think the average AUM that people pay on Autopilot is around 3 to 4%.

Does Nancy Pelosi hate you?

Probably, I would say.

Did you guys interact?

Like, we've never—

no cease and desist even from her?

Like, no.

Wow. All right, perfect.

Oh, she's getting soft.

I mean, the goal is when she retires, we try to have her actually join the fight and have a commercial. That'd be incredible. We, we did sponsor the UFC and got a fake Nancy Pelosi.

Did you see this?

This is—

no, um, and so the, the goal was, this was the UFC before the election, and Trump was supposed to sit row 1 at the UFC. And we were like, wouldn't it be funny if we sponsor the UFC and it shows Invest Like a Politician right in front of Donald Trump? And then we have a fake Nancy Pelosi right by him.

Like, you bought a ticket? Or—

Oh yeah.

Or as part of the sponsorship.

So we had the ring sponsor.

Yeah, we had the ring sponsor.

Yeah.

And then they hired a lookalike Nancy Pelosi and they had her walking in. They had like the— You had like kind of social content of her entering the arena.

Did you have to actually buy that ticket?

We had to buy that ticket. That ticket row 1 was $60,000.

$450,000. No way.

How much you spent on the whole marketing buy?

About $450,000.

Did it help?

So that makes sense.

There was. And I was like, dang, he's not here, but I'm glad he's safe. But I think if he did show up, I think the, the media that would have been picked up, the earned media would have been insane.

Hey, it was ballsy. And sometimes you got to do what you got to do. I think it's cool. We're still talking about it now, right?

Exactly.

That's attention. That's fair. That happens when you do unique, over-the-top things. So that's amazing.

We're trying to think of the next stunt, but most—

How many people work there?

Right now, 30, 35.

So you're doing $800,000 of revenue per—

It's about $1 million per employee.

Walk me through the like What does this look like if this is actually big? Because some of the weird ideas here— this is a weird idea. Yeah. And weird ideas have a lot of potential, even though on the surface it takes a little time to like understand.

I guess to me it was kind of like a common sense idea. Like, I don't know, growing up I was like, man, why can't my Robinhood account just like follow this other guy's Robinhood account automatically? Like, I don't want to just give my funds away to someone else. Like, I want to be able to do stuff myself, but I also want to like go on vacation without worrying about like when to sell or when to buy. I think the solution to me was just the most obvious. But I think the ultimate goal of Autopilot is to become the world's largest asset manager. When you look at BlackRock, they actually do this for institutions. BlackRock connects all these financial institutions. Companies will go on a tool called BlackRock Aladdin and buy different portfolios. So it already exists at the institution level.

They buy different portfolios.

BlackRock will create their own portfolios based on different risk. And so like if you're Walmart and you're, you know, heavily invested in you know, groceries for this quarter, you could actually like hedge your bet on BlackRock Aladdin. If you're a Facebook employee, you could actually find a portfolio on Autopilot that hedges like tech. And that tool that BlackRock created makes around $6 billion per year. And BlackRock's one of the largest asset managers. And so I think with Autopilot, one of our goals is to get that same tech and like build it for retail investors.

How do you get those? How do you— how are you going to hire those people?

Well, he's saying people come to the platform like two-sided marketplace.

Yeah.

And so then the pilots come and they're the ones with the ideas. You verify, you know, their employment, where they've worked. But really the goal is where anyone could just publish those portfolios and get paid. And then us as a marketplace, we take a cut of that revenue.

What would be the burning question?

I have a bunch of large macro questions on AI, but I also have questions because you guys have been running companies for 10+ years. One of the biggest things is hiring. How do you find people that are highly motivated? What questions do you ask? Because one thing that I've noticed is when you hire especially more senior level people, their ability to BS is greater than my ability to detect BS. And I think there are certain questions or certain things that you could look at that you guys probably have more experience that would actually really help Autopilot get to the next step.

Well, for one, having like a personal audience is like definitely that's probably one of the biggest perks is that you're able to like if you cold email someone, they're like, oh, I've heard of you or I know of you at the very least. At best, you have a lot of people who apply. But whenever I would hire for people who, uh, roles that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I definitely would have like an outsider hiring committee. So I would have outsiders, uh, interview people all the time. And that helped me a lot.

We've talked about this a lot in the pod where it's like, it's so fun to hire young people. They don't have any experience. It's so fun, right? Because that's what you were recently. But like 9 out of 10 times, if you're just like, like, hey, you did that there, do that same thing here.

Right.

And that tends to just be way better.

So we will map out which companies have solved this problem before. Who was the person that was there at the year when they had this problem where we are? Who was that person? And then were they the real shot caller on the team or were they just doing something? But there's somebody else who was amazing. I like go to that level of detail there. So that's one pool you got to get good at. And the other pool is like basically diamonds in the rough, like unproven talent that you can almost be a stock picker on and be like, okay, I think this person's like a 10xer and I build the company with those two pools of people. And you build systems so that you consistently are sourcing from both of those.

Yeah.

Most of the— one thing most people— are you the CEO of the business? How much time per week do you spend recruiting right now?

Right now, about 20%.

That's pretty good. Most people— that means one full day a week, basically.

Yeah.

Most founders who have like hiring problems, if you ask them that question, they're like, hours.

I think it used to be that. And now I'm like seeing how important it is.

And if you listen to like a lot of the most successful founders that were in a scaling phase, they spend like 30+ percent of their time just on recruiting.

Are you guys profitable?

Yeah.

Okay, so you're at $20 million in revenue or $30 million.

$30 million.

$30 million in revenue.

Cash flow positive, not like GAAP profitable, but—

Sure.

So you're default alive. Yeah. What's the growth rate going to be this year over the next year?

About 250%.

I would think almost your entire job is collecting people.

What sorts of people do you need to be hiring right now?

A lot of software engineers, product people. Growth people, marketing people, really anyone. But I think people, people, just people. I think the thing is, is just maintaining that high bar. And we've just hired a lot of people and perhaps I'm actually very quick to get rid of people if they like come in and within like 2 to 3 weeks they haven't really done anything. I just immediately I'm like, all right, you're getting out of here.

Is that impact that impacts culture, which is why you got to get the hiring right?

It impacts culture. But I think everyone who's been here Anyone who we, we tell people, if you're here for longer than 3 months, you don't have to worry. So I think after the 3-month mark, people are like, okay, I'm chilling. But before that, everyone's like freaked out.

Are you going to only hire in New York?

Yeah, yeah, we, we, yeah, yeah, we've— I think especially with AI, the salaries that we're paying people, like we, we just, just offered a guy like a $350K salary and I'm like, this is crazy because I've never made that much money. I still don't. But yeah, I think the goal is with AI, each person is much, much more effective. So a good person with AI could be 10, 20 times more effective than an average person with AI. That's crazy.

Yeah. My CTO used to say it too. He's like, you're one person. No, you're 3 people. He says, you're 3 people. He used to say that all the time. And people like, it's funny.

I might start saying that.

It's real simple. It's just people just realizing what you mean. It's like, no, you need to be able to do the work of 3 people because you got to be smart about what you don't do, don't do the bullshit, automate stuff, you know, figure out like a faster path. You know, that's your job is to be 3 people. And when we used to do offsites, we would say every day is 2 days, like 2 days of stuff needs to happen every day. And so I think when you do that, you set up a set of different bar for your team on how they operate.

Yeah, dude, thanks for doing this.

This is awesome.

You're awesome. We, I messaged him roughly 2 hours ago and I was like, where are you?

Yeah, I saw the post. I'm like, yo, Sam, I got to get on my first board.

Where are you?

This is a dream.

Can you be here?

Well, you guys have— are one of the great, like, growth hack stories. Like, this is what you guys did with the Pelosi tracker. You have another tracker. Do you have other trackers?

Yeah, we have, like, you know, the Leopold tracker. Who's the best right now? Leopold. He's up, you know, same amount.

Is he like a 25-year-old?

He was like a 22-year-old. He worked for OpenAI. Now he's like 25. He left OpenAI and then started a fund.

Isn't he up like $10 billion or something?

Around $5 billion.

So he's a billionaire now.

I think so.

I think he raised outside capital.

I think of a lot of, a lot of it was friends and family, but Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman and like smart money was immediately behind him.

How much did he raise?

And isn't like his— somebody is like the chief of staff at Anthropic. He's got some, some information flow as well. That's pretty good.

Yeah.

I mean, he's brilliant. Have you read his like situational awareness paper?

No.

Okay, so do this. Uh, I did this and it was very, very useful. Take the PDF for situational awareness. It was like on my list of like—

What is situational awareness?

Hedge fund name.

He published published a white paper or blog post, like a PDF before, like before he launched the hedge fund or right after. I think it was actually maybe before. And this is how he attracted the money. He launched this thing, which is basically he had a very strong point of view on like what the next 10 years of AI looks like. Very bold predictions. It was like, and then huge tension between China and America. And then because of that, this, it was like super specific predictions. Of how the puck, where the puck was going. So he published this thing and a lot of smart people were like, yo, this is like one of the smarter takes of what's going on. I think that attracted more capital, more awareness.

Situational Awareness was the name of his publication.

And I think it's the name of his, uh, his, his, whatever his company is. So take it, give it to, you have Victor in your Slack.

Yeah.

Just say, Victor, break this down into the 10 key ideas, like predictions and hypotheses that he has. Explain it and just explain it to me. Victor did a wonderful job. He like just chewed up this PDF for me. It explained it step by step. And then I asked follow-up questions and it was just great. And I was like, so did that play out? Was he right about this? Did he trade on that? And it just, it just answered every single question.

It was so good. Is a guy like him—

Victor, by the way, is like an AI thing that Sam put me onto that I am now hooked. I ended up investing in it.

Yeah, thanks for telling me. After I told you about it, you should have told me that.

Well, it was at an absurd valuation, but like, it's that good that I was like, yeah, for sure.

I told him about this tool. He's like, I don't know, I don't trust these tools. These are stupid. And then 2 days later he goes, these tools are awesome. Have you heard of this tool?

I made him feel dumb. I was like, why do you just trust a random startup with all your stuff? And then I heard about it a little more and I was like, let's try it out. And I tried it in one of my Slacks and I was like, this is amazing. Now it's in every business I have.

Yeah, that's good. But the, um, I'm curious about the personal, personal side on this. Is he like low-key right now? Is he trying to hide out?

No, he posts on Twitter.

Really? He did. He's like, he's like very good friends with Dwarkesh. So he's done the Dwarkesh pod a couple of times where, I mean, is he cool?

Yeah.

Do you think like Peter Thiel's cool? Like, you know, like, do you think a lot of Asperger's genius?

Cool.

Yeah.

Like that energy.

Yeah. He has that.

It's great.

I love it.

I love it. Yeah.

You can follow him on autopilot.

I'm saying, yeah, that's not the word I would use. I love it.

Yes.

I think he's awesome.

And so you can replicate his, you could follow his top 15 picks on autopilot. And how do you know his picks? So he filed a 13F and so it is delayed.

There's a little lag.

There's about a 45-day lag, but even we only track with the lag.

And a 13F, how big does your fund need to be?

Oh, $100 million.

Oh, okay. Damn. So he's the guy right now.

He's the guy.

He's the guy.

Does he do podcasts?

You actually get them on?

There's a couple. We're trying. I think we were reaching out. Yeah.

And it's stuff like this that makes me like very adamant of like people should always invest in index funds, but there should always be like 10 to 15% of your like net worth on high-risk, high-reward stocks or portfolios. And so this is where Autopilot doesn't right now want to take 100% of what you have, but just like 10 to 15%.

Your liquid net worth, where is it allocated? Who are you following?

Right now I follow basically like 20 different pilots on Autopilot right now.

So right now of your, of your 100% net worth.

So my 100% net worth, it's like 90% on Autopilot. A lot of it is in Autopilot.

I want to know the truthiness. So you said you connect with their brokerage account.

Yep.

But like people have many different accounts.

Yeah. So you can connect to all of them. You could.

But, but you don't know if, if this is tracking all of them or just tracking some, right? Me as the user, I don't know if you have everything that this person has done, right?

Yeah.

So winners and losers.

So what it is, is the people will go on our platform and create a model portfolio. And so you only see the history of the model portfolio from when the pilot joins to now. So it's not like actually following their brokerage account. Oh, okay. But what we do have is we have what's called skin in the game where the pilot will also put their money on Autopilot following their own portfolio. And so you could be like, wow, Peter Wolf has $500,000 following his own trades verified by Autopilot.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Are you having fun?

I would say right now I'm having fun. I would say the last 3 years have been— it's, it's hard. I would say getting from 0 to 1 million in revenue was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Getting from 1 to 30 was actually a piece of cake.

What do you think the next, the next threshold will be?

I think we're on track to hit $100 million in revenue by March next year. I think it's going to be difficult, but—

Run rate?

Recurring revenue, not run rate. Right now we're at like a $70 million run rate, but we want to get—

I passed on investing in this like twice already.

Yeah, why didn't you do it? I know.

It seemed like a really hard thing to get off the ground. It was very hard.

How did you get away with this?

Well, I'm a degenerate and they listen to MFM, I think. So like, they knew that I'm a bit of a—

And you've talked to Chris a couple of times.

I talked to Chris.

I really admired the marketing.

So I think I just reached out giving respect. I was like, hey, I think it's brilliant what you guys are doing with the Plus Tracker on Twitter and the UFC. I just thought you guys were doing a really good job without the marketing.

We wouldn't be here just because of how hard this stuff is to do.

What's your— what was the first round's valuation?

The first round was, uh, $7 million.

Really?

Yeah, but that was 2021. Like, there's a lot of, uh—

yeah, man.

Yeah.

Well, either way, I'm a fan, and, uh, I think what you guys are doing is great, man. I appreciate you coming on.

This is awesome. Awesome.

All right.

We appreciate you. Thank you, guys.

We'll talk to you a little bit. That was awesome. Good picks.

Yeah, that was cool. That was fun.

I hope this is a— this is a Hampton plug, by the way. I definitely just went into the New York channel and I just said, yeah, who's interested? Because I didn't want to tweet it out because I wasn't sure what we're going to get.

I'll do the plug for you. If you're an interesting business owner and you want to be in a community of other interesting business owners, join Hampton and maybe you too can be on MFM someday too.

Hip that I didn't realize how big Autopilot was.

I thought it's been scaling a lot. Like it wasn't that big like 6 months ago, you know.

Well, he told— I knew it was $30 million in revenue. I thought that meant like GMV-ish type thing. Because those businesses, not his business, but that category of business is usually pretty shitty, right? Like numbers can be huge, but the actual business— but not his. That's insane.

Yeah, he's doing well.

That was cool, right?

And there's also parts of their business and their lifestyles and personality that I want to like, like I love and I want to steal, right? But I don't admire the whole thing. Like, for example, Alex, I'm like, oh man, he's so calm. Like, right? Like, oh, I need to learn from that. I don't necessarily want to trade what I have for what he has, but like, I want to steal this from him.

And he wasn't in a rush. Yeah. Better and for worse, but mostly for better.

And same with Brian. Huge business taking off. I don't want to do all those stunts. I don't want to raise VC, but that's pretty awesome.

But I admire the creativity.

Yeah.

And then like Josh's outdoor business, I'm like, that's awesome. I don't want to raise money, but like, it would be maybe fun to own one. Like, you know, like there's really small—

but I should go camping.

Yeah. No, but there's like small things, right? Like, you know, I think people sometimes in the comments tease us about like having— I hate when people say you have these guests that are out of touch. Whenever I hear that, I'm like, No, you're out of touch with his life.

Yeah, that's about you.

You're out of touch. No, what I mean is I'm like, I am equally impressed by like a billion-dollar company versus a $5 million company. They're all— they're both equally awesome.

Somebody, Jesse Itzler, said this at one of our events. It was like an intro. I said, hey, what does somebody— what do people— what should people know about you? Like, hey, I'm Jesse Itzler, blah, blah, blah.

I did this.

He goes, my thing is is I root for everybody, because when you root for everybody, you can never lose. And then he sat down and I was like, yo, I kind of like that fortune cookie shit he just did.

Is Jesse Itzler really a cool Black man?

Yeah, yeah, no, he's the best. It's cool Black guys like him. Yeah, it's like, whoa, that's like the next level. So in the same way of like, you, when you root for everybody, you can never lose, or something like, if you think you can learn from everybody, you can never lose, right? So it's I'm like, great, tomorrow we're talking to Ray Dalio. There's going to be some awesome things to learn from him. Again, parts, not the whole. We're not trying to do what he's doing, but I'm still going to pull something away. I'm going to get a win and I'm going to have some fun in that hour. Just in the same way I got wins and learnings and fun in this hour.

I think the new slogan should be we get, you know, high high and low low because I get like equal joy. Like we'll go to the, we'll like pop into a bodega. I'll love that shit. And now we're going to go hang out with like the AD of the richest person in the world. I'm going to love that equally.

Right.

All right.

That's it.

That's the All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. Because if you're listening to this, you like podcasts. And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast. And let me tell you, another podcast you should check out, it's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q&A sessions with successful business leaders, or hearing keynote presentations, or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics, this is a great podcast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.